A Separate Country (34 page)

I didn’t pull the trigger. He looked up at me out of the corner of his eye, smiling some, like he was glad to see me. I was disoriented, I felt the whole creeping swamp around me shifting, taking new angles on me, waiting for me to stumble so that I could be wrapped up and carried high into the treetops for devouring. Which one of us was a part of the swamp, which one was the agent of its will, its tooth and claw? I meant to be, but I didn’t know. He continued.

“I don’t mean to call him merely your nigger, General Hood. I know who he is. Was. And I know that he is much more to you than a nigger. I know what kind of man he was, I knew him before that night at the ball. That is not something I’m proud of now, believe it or not.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It is true, nonetheless. I have done two things these last few months, one that makes me proud and one that makes me think I shall burn for eternity, and both of them were for you.”

The little slippery, greasy, backwoods hypocrite and liar. Put it on me? I was a god, the God of War and Vengeance, I could not be blamed. I did not move on a plane subject to the judgments of mortals. And yet I listened, listened as if playing with the mouse before biting its stomach out.

“You admire me, and because you admire me you lynch a friend, badly, and finally come back to finish your work with a pillow? That’s admiration?”

“Let me stand.”

“You may sit.”

He sat on his ass, his knees drawn up to his chest, rocking, still trying to get his breath back. I watched his pants go dark from the wet seeping up from the ground. He had scratched his face, or perhaps I had scratched it, but in any case the blood ran down his face in thin, straight streams and clotted near the edge of his mouth. He looked painted for Carnival.

“I sit. And I say,
I admire you, Hood, because you are saving yourself, though you were the Devil and you damned me, damned me, damned damned damned. You ascend to Heaven now.
And I, I only, I wanted to help you.
”

He held up his hand not to protect himself but, it seemed, only to delay what he had already decided was the inevitable. Again I didn’t fire.

“You had no business keeping that man alive, General.”

“You botched the job, not me. I only helped to clean up your mess.”

“Oh no, General. I didn’t botch, as you say, the job. I did it too well! I meant to tie that knot, and the knots on his hands, in a way so that he could slip out once we had gone. I told him, I whispered it to him. He nodded his head. I said to never come back, and he nodded his head again. He was a brave man, though a nigger. Among other things.”

“The branch broke. That’s what saved him, not some absurd gesture of goodwill.”

“Yes. I tied the knots too tight! These hands”—he looked down at them, caked in black silt and brown mud—“these hands are very good with knots, much practice. They work on their own.”

“You’re a liar.”

“If he could talk, he would tell you.”

“That’s not at all funny.”

“I mean it sincerely. If he could have ever talked, he would have proven my innocence.”

“Then why string him up at all? What were you doing?”

“That was for your benefit, Lieutenant. You could not intimidate me. If you were coming for me, I thought, I would rip your world apart, throat to gut, beginning with the octoroon spy you’d sent after me. He had no business there.”

At that moment I successfully entered his world, distorted and blinkered as it was, and understood what he had done. He was describing a demonstration, a feint, something to scare me away. Why would I come for him? I suppose he assumed I felt guilt for Texas, for chasing down the Comanche, that I would need to have him killed. I didn’t feel guilt, but he thought I did.
He thought it
. He felt it. He was a better man, if more brutal, for crediting me with an emotion I should have possessed but did not. I did not. I thought I didn’t, anyway.

“So why would you try to spare him?”

“I am not an animal,” he said, showing me his hands. Thick, horny skin broken by ragged calluses. “And I had begun something, I will admit, that I couldn’t stop without risking
my
neck. Things get out of hand, slip away. They get bigger than what they’re supposed to, and far worse, no? And I became angry when you pretended not to know me. Me!”

He was raving now, spitting out the sides of his mouth, trying to get it all out before the inevitable. He clutched his knees. His legs were entirely covered in dark mud. He looked like something just emerging from the swamp.

“And then why would you kill him?”

“Because he was my responsibility, and not yours. I had made him that way. He collapsed on
my
march, and had to be left behind. All you and your midget and your priest had done was extend that man’s pain. Not enough to live, not enough to die.”

“He showed no pain.”

“Life is pain. If no pain, there is no life, and yet you wouldn’t release him. How do you know what he felt, did he talk to you? Make hand signals? No. So I did it for you. You didn’t have the guts, and I do. Perhaps you were afraid, or sentimental. The kindest thing was to let him go. You never did understand mercy. Never. You left it to me to end the pain back in Texas. I put an end to the pain you caused. But this time it was pain I had caused and you were prolonging it, perverse bastard, and so I took control. And I did it knowing you would come after me, so here we are, and I am about to die.”

I raised the pistol.

How had Father Mike found us? And why hadn’t I heard him? He must have ridden behind me, and yet I hadn’t noticed. I had been so intent on my quarry, I hadn’t heard a giant priest on a mule clomping behind me. But now he stepped into the clearing and I finally understood the stories Anna Marie had told, the stories of the brawler and the sensualist, the boy who made men afraid. Here he was, older, the sleeves on his shirt rolled up above the elbow, his forearms near as big as my leg. My good leg. He stepped between us and we both looked up. His hair, always long, was now wrung with sweat and whipped about his huge head. He glared down at both of us, but mostly at me. It was impossible to imagine him presiding over the Eucharist. He looked fit only to preside over the wrestling of alligators.

“Put the pistol down.”

“I won’t.”

“Fool, I’ll take it from you and make you eat it.”

I lowered the pistol.

“Give it to me.”

Sebastien called out, desperately. “Show me the mercy! End this now, Hood. The pain! Don’t listen to him!” But I could see in Sebastien’s eyes that he was relieved, that he knew he wouldn’t be dying today. Even so, I didn’t hand over the pistol.

“What about Paschal?” I asked him.

“Paschal reconciled himself to the Church through me, he has been relieved of his sin, and now he is at peace. And now I’m here to make sure that another of my friends, though I’m not sure why I call you
friend,
that another of my friends doesn’t do something very stupid he’ll regret later. You are a Christian? Then I command forgiveness from you in the name of Jesus.”

“You’re commanding me?”

“It’s the language you speak, unfortunately.”

And then he had the pistol. I don’t know how he moved so fast, but first it was in my hand, and then it was in his, a tiny thing against his palm. He pocketed it.

“Are you otherwise armed?”

“No.”

He lifted Sebastien up by the back collar of his shirt, like a man picking up a kitten, and fished through his pockets. Out came four knives and a small-bore pistol. These went into Father Mike’s pockets also.

“I followed you, John, because this man is damned by you, but you can still be saved. God is here, God is
right
here. I will help you see Him, but you must forgive. I will help you, but you must ask. There will be no more killing today, or I will break my vows and have my own vengeance. I hope I am not being ambiguous.”

Then he walked into the woods and, a few minutes later, I heard his mule clop-clopping away, back toward the city, like some country friar off to talk to the birds. He made me afraid, he awed me. I never thought to follow him, and I never thought to ask him about his appearance in the swamp that day. He was some other kind of being, something born in the muddy woods to which he returned. When I saw him again he was just Father Mike, but in the swamp he was mysterious and lethal, like the alligator.

I went over to a log and sat down.

“What will we do now?” Sebastien said.

“Reminisce, what else do we have?” I said.

And we were there for three hours. After some time I relaxed. I tended his cut, and tied up his horse, and holstered my weapon. I spared him. My head flooded with thought, language, the complexities of expressing life in words and sentences. I was no longer the General, and I hoped the General was gone for good.

The city disintegrated around us, and we knew it to be our fault. Reconstruction was over and we had not been reformed or reconstructed. Men had become, perhaps, more vicious for having thought of themselves as the conquered for so long. We were the conquered, as General Lee said, and we owed obeisance to the conquerors. If only the conquerors had possessed greater will, for now that they were gone, along with their Freedmen’s Bureaus and their garrisons and their sham legislatures, our people asserted themselves brutally, as if they could take back what was lost and more, as if they could make time reverse itself.

Sebastien had hanged a colored man no blacker than himself, and had witnessed the burning of the colored school in the Vieux Carré a few weeks before. The appeasers and collaborators, the Republicans and the other opportunists, kept their heads down. The White League—old French Creole reactionaries and other white Southern nationalists—met and plotted in the open. Elections had become occasions for battle, and we had endured the ignominy of two competing legislatures and governors set up in nearby hotels. My friend General Longstreet had been trapped in that conflict, and had made the impolitic—if also honorable—decision to denounce the violence and the resistance to Federal and Republican rule, and he lost his position in society and his insurance business. The rest of the Confederate generals in New Orleans—Hooker, Beauregard, and me—knew enough to keep our heads down, to bide our time, and for my canniness I was given General Longstreet’s insurance business. Let it not be said that cowardice is without reward.

So here we were, fighting the war again and again and again. When I mentioned this to Sebastien, he nodded. He’d been to Shiloh, he’d ridden with General Forrest at Fort Pillow, he knew what we’d done.
I don’t know, Hood, if I’m suited for a world where there ain’t killing to be done. No sir
. And I told him that was my fault, and he nodded his head.

Things that weren’t my fault: disease, heat, floods. At the periphery of the city the cannons sounded each night at dusk against the coming miasma, that unseen mass that carried yellow fever and malaria and cholera and houdou things. I told Sebastien that the report of the cannon made me flinch, and that its echo rang in my ears long afterward. Firing out into the night at the unseen and unknown. That seemed right: we were a city under siege, cut up and slowly murdered from within and without. All we had was the river, and Lord help us if it quit carrying the packet boats and the barges to us.

“The cannons,” Sebastien said, touching the clotted blood curtaining his cheek. “The cannons are my friends. We can still fight, that’s what they say to me.”

“I don’t care if I never hear the sound of a cannon, or a rifle, or a pistol, or a sword unsheathed, ever again.”

“That’s not what I would have expected you to say, General.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what else do you really know?”

“I am a husband and a father. I know that. I sell insurance.”

“Are you good at any of those?”

I paused to think about that. Might as well be honest.

“No.”

“What else?”

“I take care of sick people when I can. I buy things for them, blankets and medicines and such. I help.”

“And that? Are you good at that?”

Another pause. It crossed my mind, not for the last time, that I might have spared myself much anxiety and trouble had I just killed him outright like I’d intended. Was I good with the sick? Was I a healer?

“No. But I refuse to fail at that. I refuse.”

“But your wife, your children, your business? You do not care?”

The admission, finally. I could make it, now that my quarry had become my counselor.

“I don’t know. I don’t think about those things so much.”

“But disease, yes? Disease you think about often.”

“Always.”

It killed without discrimination, and death by yellow fever was excruciating. It came on the body so suddenly that even in death the victims seemed incredulous, unbelieving. They were healthy, walking the street and chasing their children, and then they were down. I cannot say whether it was my experience of war that drew me to the diseased, or the disease that helped me understand my war. In either case, I had been overcome by an obsession. I could not tolerate even one death, and yet I was bedside for hundreds. Each death brought me one step closer to Hell, I was sure of it, for they were my fault somehow. I had never stood on a battlefield holding the hands of the dying or burying the dead, the men whose last moments had been conceived and ordered by me, and yet I could not leave the diseased alone, and every rattle and rasp, every towel of sputum, every pine box, I added to my own tally, which was the tally of my transgressions, the things I would have to explain to God. I never turned my head to the heavens and thought
Why?
because I knew there was no sense, just as I now knew there had been no sense in my pursuit of the Comanche, or in that bloody charge at Franklin. It was all part of my lot, the bringer of endings, blithe and stupid destroyer. I told Sebastien none of this, but I had the feeling he could hear my thoughts. He looked at me kindly, and this frightened me.

“I don’t want to see you again, Sebastien. I’ll kill you next time. Or Rintrah will. They were friends, he and Paschal.”